Review: Buck

 This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.  

The Feel
Dir. Cindy Meehl
2011

Not knowing a lot about Buck before I walked into the theater, I sat down assuming I was about to witness the inspirational tale of a “horse whisperer.” The story of Buck Brannaman is one that lends itself to such Hollywood sensationalism, ripe for reimagining as a feel-good family flick. But this spin isn’t something I imagine Buck himself endorsing. A staid-but-pleasant stand-up guy, Buck isn’t here to make magic, and you’re not going to catch any symphonic swell when he mounts a horse. His job is to show people how they’re failing to communicate with their animals. While that may sound pragmatic enough, Buck finds a grandeur of its own in its reflections on growth, connection, and redemption. By rethinking the way we approach animal training, we are forced to confront the ways in which we, too, have been “trained”– and the choices we can still make in the wake of our conditioning.

Director Cindy Meehl and editor Toby Shimin make Buck essentially the cinematic incarnation of Brannaman himself. Spending 90 minutes in the theater with this documentary feels a whole lot like a day at the ranch, which is a novel experience indeed for the average art house moviegoer. The film can be lovely, humane, unassuming, and occasionally a bit dull– all traits of the man in question. Meehl effectively strikes a balance between the transcendent and the mundane to evoke the spirit of life in the country, and specifically life with horses. The animals are photographed beautifully: sweat shimmering on hides, muscles surging, dust kicked up amidst crisp sunlight and grasses. But most of the time we’re just following Brannaman, whether he’s dispensing revelatory advice to a crowd or logging hours in the truck between towns.

Continue reading at Filmwell.

 

 

Review: Winnie the Pooh

This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.

Oh Simple Thing
Dir. Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall
2011

The advertising campaign for Disney's new Winnie the Pooh film is genius. I am convinced it was devised by a pack of hip interns-- who else would think it was a good idea to use the melancholy soft-rock of Keane in a trailer for a children's film? But as the chords of "Somewhere Only We Know" start to pound over the image of Pooh and Friends marching across a bridge, it hits you right in the gut-- or at least it's supposed to. "Admit it," we are beckoned by the television spots (in Helvetica, no less!). "You miss them." Oh, how you know us, hip Disney interns! Winnie the Pooh knows it will not be able to grab today's ADHD children in a twenty second commercial, with its soft coloring and mild manners. No, instead it aims upward, at literate young parents desperate to instill a sense of taste in their children, children buffeted every day by the frenzied snark of sugar cereal ads. "Oh simple thing, where have you gone," goes the song, played over glimpses of the Hundred Acre Wood. "I'm getting old and I need something to rely on."

While this Winnie the Pooh seems to be something of a "reboot" of the series, it's not as if the bear has been on hiatus. We may associate Pooh's pop culture presence with the Disney films of the sixties and seventies, but he has also had a syndicated series through the nineties, several theatrical and DVD releases in the last decade, and untold volumes of merchandise hawked in Disney's parks. Pooh, as an idea, never really went away. But as the franchise edged closer to irrelevance, it seemed to get more desperate-- the characters became ever more bright and plastic, culminating in the sacrilege of a computer-animated series on Playhouse Disney made to ape the likes of "Dora the Explorer." In this light, Winnie the Pooh functions as a reclaiming of the series, a decided stand against the hyper devolution of children's entertainment.

Continued at Filmwell...

 

  

Review: Beginners

 

 

(This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.)

Start Something
Written and Directed by Mike Mills
2011

"You don't know me. I like that." So says the She of Beginners to the He, on one of those floating walks that fill up the start of a relationship. She's teasing him, but we know it's more than a bit of banter-- it's an attitude that can easily turn into a way of life. Beginners is at once an ode to this sentiment and a critique of it, equally at home in the giggles and piggyback rides of early love and in the unbearable looks at a person you know you are supposed to understand but do not. The film takes us inside that curious rush of hope and mystery that comes with a beginning, but it follows those firsts shoots further into maturity than most romances would dare.

The title of this film makes it easy to pre-judge it: oh, look, another cute indie drama where people fumble into relationships and find out life is sad and beautiful and complicated, because, you know, we are all beginners, etc., etc. And that assessment isn't entirely off-- Beginners is indeed a stylized relationship drama that adheres to the 21st century aesthetic of quirk. But writer/director Mike Mills' strength is in his sense of arrangement, of context. He elevates what could be trite hipster sentimentality into a fully-realized human portrait by giving us a life in patchwork, sewing together sharp little bits of past and present. This is not a film about beginners as people who are "just waking up," people whose lives prior to the film's plot must have been an unimaginably dull morass (Garden State, anyone?). The beginners of Mill's film have been at the business of life for a while. The circumstances that befall them in Beginners are not earth-shattering. They simply push the characters to look at themselves and this moment within the narrative of their lives, and to say, yes, this is important, and yes, I'm going to start something.

Continued at Filmwell...

 

 

Review: Midnight in Paris

 

 

(This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.)

La Belle Époque 
Written and Directed by Woody Allen 2011 
(Spoilers Aplenty!)

 Midnight in Paris: the title slides in one ear and out the other, the words worn down to wisps of meaning. Juxtaposing them is almost a joke-- for what two words have borne the weight of greater romantic cliché? But wouldn't you know that Woody Allen's newest film brings both "midnight" and "Paris" back to glittering life, the images repossessed of the magic they once evoked. Midnight in Paris is a film with its brain on and its heart wide open, self-aware and swoony at once. Amid the sprightly proceedings, Allen reveals a shocking optimism that dares us to find the charm inside our lives, with just a sprinkling of experience to give it savor.

Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is in Paris, which is just about heaven by his standards. His well-bred fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), has different tastes, her sights set on a life of massages and social climbing in Malibu. The two are tagging along on her father's business trip, and while Inez is intent on spending time brunching, wedding-planning, and entertaining the company of a smug fellow vacationer, Gil is trying to refine the manuscript of his novel. For Gil, Paris is the antidote to soul-sucking Hollywood, an emblem of romance and culture and everything writerly. Inez tells him he's in love with a fantasy, and we might be inclined to believe her-- until that very fantasy springs to life before our eyes.

Continued at Filmwell...